Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Antetokounmpo has much potential
His numbers are ordinary. His name is not.
And his potential, that’s still to be proven.
A player who averaged 5.2 points and 2.9 rebounds per game in his lone season of college basketball, primarily as a backup for a team that didn’t finish with a winning record, wouldn’t ordinarily seem like much of an NBA draft prospect. But in this case, the player in question is Kostas Antetokounmpo — who believes that he is ready to follow his All-Star brother Giannis into the league.
On Thursday night, he’ll find out which NBA club agrees.
“I feel like when you do a sport, when you do something, you want to be the best at it,” Kostas Antetokounmpo said. “Since I was little I wanted to be an NBA player. So it’s about time.”
Maybe so, but unlike his brother — the Milwaukee star who might be an MVP candidate for years to come — Kostas Antetokounmpo’s game is nowhere near the elite level.
“He can be really good,” Giannis Antetokounmpo said. “He has a lot of things to work on. But I think he can be really good if he gets with the right team and tries to get better every day.”
Kostas Antetokounmpo, 20, struggled to remain a big part of the rotation at Dayton in his one college season, starting six games early in the year but also playing less than 10 minutes in six others. He had a big game off the bench
late in the season to help the Flyers beat Saint Louis, and after that game Dayton Coach Anthony Grant pointed to that as the sign of what Antetokounmpo can do.
“That’s what he’s capable of,” Grant said, “when he puts his mind to it.”
The good news for Kostas Antetokounmpo is this: He knows he’s nowhere near a finished product.
He’s 6-foot-10 with long arms, his standing reach extending just 10 inches shy of the rim. But he’s only 195 pounds, needs to work on his strength and missed basically half of his free-throw tries last season.
“I know that I’ve got to let my body get stronger,” he said. “I’ve got to get my weight up. I’ve got to work on the way I read the game, and my moves.”
If he makes the NBA, Kostas would be the third Antetokounmpo brother to reach the league. Besides Giannis, there was Thanasis, who appeared in two games for the New York Knicks in 2016. And there’s a fourth one on the way, that being Alex, 16, someone who Giannis and Kostas both predict might be the best in the family.
So soon, Alex will likely deal with what Kostas is dealing with now — inevitable comparisons to the more-famous brother.
Kostas and Giannis are built similarly, with their long, lean frames and almost neverending reach. They sound alike in some ways, but both insist that they do not play the game the same way. It used to be difficult for Kostas to carry the label of “the next Antetokounmpo,” he said, though over time he thinks he’s been judged more on the merits of his own game.